Chapter Text
In a quiet corner of West Sussex lived the boy who would end the world.
He weighed around seventeen pounds and was exactly twenty-six inches long, which was almost exactly what he should have been at around six months old. He had blue eyes – like his putative father – and curly blond hair. The curly blond hair was unlike either of his ‘parents’, but that wasn’t too much of a problem, since Harriet Dowling said that she had been a blonde baby herself, darkening to brunette by the time she was ten or so. He had the smallest fingernails Crowley had ever seen and – if Crowley had been pushed to admit – quite lovely little toesie-woesies. His name was Warlock Thaddeus Chadwick Dowling, but that wasn’t his fault and there was no use in holding it against him, any more than it was his fault that one day he would command the armies of his father, Satan, and plunge the world into neverending darkness and hellfire.
“You can’t choose the hand you’re dealt,” Crowley said, rocking the baby’s pushchair with a kitten-heeled foot. “Some people just get the crap jobs, and there’s nothing you can do but make the best of it.”
She adjusted her tinted glasses and peered up at the sky, as if expecting something to descend from it. It had been a while, and she was starting to get concerned. She’d been doing the satanic nanny thing for four months now, but it was all going to be for nothing unless her opposite number checked in and started influencing the child in the ways of light and goodness. That had been the plan all along. Cancel each other out.
“Perhaps I could be a gardener,” Aziraphale had said. “Everyone needs gardeners, and I’ve seen the ambassador’s country residence down in West Sussex. Tudor mansion. Huge gardens. I could be a rustic local who knows all the ways of the soil.”
“Please don’t,” Crowley had said, one eye on a sickly spider plant on the bookshop window. It took a genuinely black thumb to make something as easy as a spider plant suffer, and by the looks of things the angel had two. “I know you. You’ll turn up like a lost Starkadder cousin, with a ridiculous accent and a straw between your teeth.”
“I would not.”
“You would. You’re the worst at judging how to dress for an occasion. You’ve been wearing the same coat since the nineteenth century. Admit it – your gardener disguise involves a smock, doesn’t it?”
“No,” Aziraphale had said, but it had, because Crowley knew him far too well. There would be a smock, and a straw hat, and a strange pastoral accent that was neither Sussex nor Somerset, but did skate suspiciously close to something that might have been heard during a village amateur dramatic society’s production of The Pirates of Penzance.
Warlock had been alive for six months now, six months since Crowley and Aziraphale – trollied on Chateauneuf du Pape – had shaken hands in the back of the bookshop and agreed that they needed to work together. Four months since Crowley had last seen the angel, who had been ruminating on possible disguises. Four months in which Aziraphale had doubtless put some serious thought into how he meant to go undercover in the ambassador’s household, which was a worry, because whenever Aziraphale put thought into any form of subterfuge the results were always far, far worse than if he’d put in no thought at all. The very worst case scenario involved him drawing on a curly black moustache with an eyebrow pencil and pulling a series of irritated rabbits out of hats.
Crowley had put up with a lot from the angel over the millenia, but her tolerance always threatened to snap whenever Harry the fucking Rabbit came out to play.
The baby whimpered in his sleep. His cheeks were red and fat, his lower lip wet with drool. He was teething and Harriet Dowling had had just about enough of her nipples being munched on, much to the chagrin of her husband, who kept quoting statistics about how breast was best, and how babies in the developing world didn’t have separation anxiety because they were breastfed until they were at least five years old. Crowley had been standing behind the dining room door when this conversation took place, and had heard every word, including the loud ones that followed, and the sound of a half full breast pump splattering against the late eighteenth century oak panelling.
“We’re weaning, Nanny,” Mrs Dowling had announced, stomping out of the dining room with damp patches on her blouse and a fine mist of breast milk decorating her hair.
Warlock’s whimper turned to a mewl. Somewhere in the reed beds a radio crackled in response. Crowley had taken the baby down to the Wetlands Trust for a peaceful stroll, but they had come here in an armoured black SUV, with Warlock strapped into his latest complicated car seat. With the Dowlings you were never far away from their security detail at any given time. Someone was always watching.
Crowley had never really given much thought about how it would feel to be part of an ambassador’s household, beyond vague thoughts that at some point someone was probably going to appear with a pyramid of moderately priced chocolates on a tray and they all would be obliged to tell the ambassador that with these moderately priced chocolates he was really spoiling them. That hadn’t happened. What had happened was a startling amount of sex. It turned out that when you introduced a number of muscular and largely good looking security guys to a mostly female housekeeping staff, they all started shagging each other. A lot. At least every third night Crowley would go to fetch a bottle or a mislaid tub of baby powder and stumble across some sign of sexual indiscretion – a giggle, a shush, or the hem of a white nightie fluttering behind a closing door.
In some respects it was a lot like those reality shows that Crowley had been so proud of helping to create: everyone was watching, being watched, and sneaking off to bang one another. Nanny Ashtoreth strode through it all with a poker-spined veneer of obliviousness, although of course she couldn’t miss the frisson of sexual interest that occasionally hung like smoke in hallways behind her. There was something about Ashtoreth that appealed to a certain type of man, usually men who were expensively educated and raised at arm’s length from their mothers. The kind of men who were frequently promoted – due to family connections or simple upward failures – to ranks far beyond their intellectual ability or competence. This would inevitably cause them considerable stress, but they were too short on self-awareness to understand that they were out of their depths, and also because their old school boating song had assured them that society waited for them, not vice versa.
At first glance, Thaddeus Dowling was one such man. Likely millions had been sunk into his education over the years, but sometimes his lips still moved when he read. When he’d had a hard day he reached not for the nearest bottle of spirits, but the nursery comfort of a glass of cold, creamy milk and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Nanny Ashtoreth had caught him looking, his round blue eyes lingering over her leather gloves, seamed black stockings and pencil skirts, things that advertised a sexuality where all he could enjoy the luxury of eschewing all decisions and simply doing as he was told, because Nanny knew best.
He had always been interested in what was going on behind her glasses. “I bet you’ve got beautiful eyes,” he’d said, ignoring her protests that she had a medical condition – light sensitivity and migraines – that meant she would prefer to keep her glasses on. Then one day he put his hand on her bottom and got an eyeful. Two eyefuls, to be precise. Two large, yellow, slit-pupiled and so-not-human eyefuls. “Mr Ambassssador,” Nanny had hissed. “When I tell you that I’m not your type, believe me.”
He hadn’t tried it on again after that. Besides, as it turned out, he didn’t have a type at all. If Crowley had been asked to categorise his type she might have said ‘anything with a pulse and a head’, but then one day Mrs Dowling had crept into the nursery, wearing a fraught expression and clutching what had looked like a battery operated torch but wasn’t, on account of it not having batteries and having a fully formed latex vulva where it should have had a lightbulb. Heads and pulses were apparently optional. “Why is he like this?” said Harriet Dowling. “It was in the glovebox. I literally thought it was a flashlight. I was groping around in the dark trying to figure out why it wouldn’t work and the next thing I know I’m knuckle deep in a…in a rubber vagina. I touched it. I don’t even know how you clean a thing like that, and now I can’t stop thinking about it.”
There had been tears, and rage, and Crowley had learned what a rubber vagina sounded like when it was flung very hard against eighteenth century oak panelling. “Of course his…his pocket pussy doesn’t have an episiotomy scar. My mom always said that men go off when you have a baby. Like, I’d accepted that, but she never told me that my body would feel like a bomb had gone off in it. Nothing is where it used to be, Nanny. Nothing. I’m just a mess of leaks and scar tissue and I know it was always going to be different after a baby, but it would be so much easier to get used to this new body if he’d just kiss me and hold me and tell me I’m beautiful. It’s not much to ask, is it?”
“It’s not, ma’am,” said Nanny. “And your body is more than beautiful. It’s miraculous. Your body has created a life.”
“Thank you, Nanny,” said Mrs Dowling, drying her eyes. “That means a lot right now. Thank you. Sometimes I feel as though you’re the only woman around here who can trust.”
“That’s very kind of you to say so,” Nanny had said, trying very hard not to think what might have happened to the actual life that Mrs Dowling had pushed out at the convent of the Chattering Order of St Beryl. The baby had probably been discreetly adopted somewhere. Or just left on the doorstep of some kindly but childless couple. Not even a couple. Perhaps a pair of old bachelors who lived together for the sake of old acquaintance and convenience, and who – while trying and failing to find the child’s birth parents, and through a series of heartwarming moments with the baby – came to realise that they were not only ready to be parents themselves, but were also shatteringly in love with one another, and they all lived happily ever after.
Probably. Not that Crowley had put much thought into it.
The baby was getting restless, so Crowley made her way back through the tall reeds to the SUV. She didn’t get to drive these days, and pined for her Bentley, safely stored in London. That had been the hardest thing of all to give up – the Bentley. She had never been that attached to the notion of being one gender or another, so she didn’t miss the penis, or the nuisance of stuffing it into skinny jeans. Neither did she miss the ability to walk safely in dark places, because Crowley was almost always the worst thing in any given dark place.
But the Bentley. That one had caused a pang. That and the kitten heels. Crowley loathed kitten heels. She felt they made her already large feet look even larger, but the lecherous Dowling meant this was no place to be wearing anything as un-Nannyish as four inch heels. That and the fact that in really high heels Crowley was over six and a half feet tall, and the house had a lot of those low Tudor doorways that put her in mind of that one French king, the one who had fatally beaned himself on a door lintel after a game of tennis.
They drove back to the mansion. As Crowley moved to extract Warlock from his various straps and fastenings she saw that theirs was not the vehicle on the gravel drive. In front of them was a taxi.
Crowley’s first glimpse of the taxi’s passenger came from the rear. It was a generous rear, and its modest covering of pale tweed did little to disguise that in the right light – a red firelight, for example – it would have most definitely made the rockin’ world go round. Beneath the hem of the skirt were a pair of fleshy calves, tapering into a pair of ankles whose surprising delicacy caused Crowley a sharp jolt of recognition. She’d clocked those dainty ankles before, in stockings both silk and knit, bare beneath the hem of a gold-embroidered robe, or glimpsed – Argyle socked and probably gartered – between the cuffs of tweed trousers and a pair of brown Oxfords.
The brogues were still there, but they were lighter, their heels higher. They crunched down onto the gravel and Crowley watched in astonishment as a voluptuous figure extracted itself from the taxi.
The angel had clearly decided not to go with ‘comedy yokel’ for her gardener’s disguise, but it was cold comfort to Crowley, who could already see the kind of havoc Aziraphale was going to cause around the place. Aziraphale’s few extra pounds had translated themselves to a set of overripe curves that were testing the side seams of her dreary tweed skirt to the max. Her tidy cropped curls were now chin length, and a passing breeze tousled them into a platinum blonde Marilyn mop. When she turned her head to brush her cowlick out of her eyes, Crowley caught sight of the new profile – the same arched eyebrows and tip-tilted nose as before – but transfigured by the angel’s feminine disguise.
“Hey, lady – you can’t park here,” said one of the security detail, and Aziraphale turned, almost knocking the man over with the sheer force of teeth and tits. Aziraphale’s smile was beguiling enough in his regular corporation, but in this one it was irresistable. And then there were the boobs. Sweet Satan, the boobs. Two perfect creamy pink mounds jostling in the V of a lace trimmed blouse.
“Oh, I’m dreadfully sorry,” she said. “I know there’s probably a tradesmen’s entrance somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it. I’m the new gardener, you see.”
Tradesman’s entrance? Did he – beg pardon, she – even hear herself sometimes? Apparently changing sex had done nothing to blunt Aziraphale’s talent for accidental innuendo. If anything, it had made it worse, because now everyone would want to fuck her, and not just Crowley. Those breasts were ridiculous.
“Let me take care of this,” Crowley said, stepping forward, the baby on her hip. “You’ll be wanting the servant’s entrance, miss,” she said, in Nanny’s cultivated Scottish purr. As soon as the secret service guy turned away she switched back into her usual accent. “A lady gardener?” she said, in a piercing whisper. “Really?”
“You told me to be modern about it,” said Aziraphale. “Women can be gardeners now.” She smiled uncertainly at the baby. “Is that…is that him?”
“Yes. And before you ask, he doesn’t have hooves,” said Crowley, quickly returning to the more immediate problem. She nodded down at the angel’s remarkable new corporation. “And never mind that. What were you thinking?”
She didn’t get any further, because Ambassador Dowling came striding across the gravel, beaming all over his face. “Well, hello,” he said, making a beeline for Aziraphale. “Can I help you?”
“Oh, yes. Hello,” said Aziraphale, holding out a hand in greeting. “I’m Frances Fell, the new gardener.”
Shit. Dowling was plainly charmed. His eyes immediately settled on Aziraphale’s cleavage, far too prominently displayed and garnished with a white gardenia pinned to her tweed lapel. “Delighted,” he said, and pretended to be interested in the boutonniere. “Is that a…?”
“…flower?” Aziraphale floundered. “Yes. Yes, it is.”
“Gardenia,” said Crowley, through clenched teeth. “That’s a gardenia.”
Mercifully, Harriet Dowling – a woman all too accustomed to catching her husband staring down other women’s blouses – popped out of the front door like a decorative figure from a cuckoo clock. “Thad?”
“Oh, hi sweetheart. Look. The new gardener is here!”
Incredulity and politeness fought briefly on Mrs Dowling’s face. Very briefly, because Incredulity almost immediately incapacitated Politeness with a sharp, gasping uppercut to the throat. She caught Crowley’s eyes, and Incredulity gained several new friends in a hurry – Despair, Desperation and HELP!
“Perhaps if you took the baby, ma’am,” Crowley said, handing over Warlock. “I could show Miss Fell to the gardener’s residence?”
“Thank you, Nanny.”
“Oh, it’s nothing.” She pinched the baby’s dimpled cheek. “Besides, the poor little lamb has been missing Mummy and Daddy, haven’t you, my cupcake.” She gave Mrs Dowling one of those thin, knowing smiles that had to suffice in the absence of a wink. “Especially Daddy.”
“That would be nice,” said Mrs Dowling, catching on. She immediately brightened and handed the now loudly whining baby to her husband. “It’s been so long since you had some quality time with Warlock, darling.”
The two woman-shaped supernatural entities made their escape. “Are you out of your celestial mind?” said Crowley, when they were at a safe distance.
“What?” said Aziraphale. “You were the one who said I should avoid smocks.”
“Smocks are beside the point. You’re supposed to be a gardener and you literally don’t know a gardenia from your own left tit. Which, by the way…can we please talk about the breasts?”
“Is there something the matter with them?”
“They’re huge!”
Aziraphale self-consciously smoothed down the front of her overstuffed blouse. “Well, you know me,” she said. “I’ve always been fuller figured, and as a matter of fact I think it’s rather insensitive of you to point that out…”
“…no, it wasn’t a dig about your weight.”
“It certainly sounded that way to me,” said Aziraphale. “We can’t all exist on whiskey and caffeine, you know.”
Oh, this was weird. While Aziraphale had evinced an almost fatal weakness for frilly things back in the late eighteenth century (revolutionary France, to be precise) he had – in general – always been a much more masculine entity than Crowley, who was happy to slither between the sexes whenever it suited. Crowley had a lot of theories about this, plenty of them uncharitable. After all, for much of human history a woman’s place had been in the wrong, and perhaps Aziraphale had picked up that perception? “Nonsense,” Aziraphale had said, one night when Crowley had been pissed enough to voice this thought. “If you’re trying to point out that I’m sexist then I’m afraid you’re being absurd. I’m an angel. By definition I am sexless, so I don’t see how I can be sexist.” Actually he’d said ‘sexisht’, because the Mouton Rothschild had been flowing pretty freely at that hour of the night, and he’d topped up his glass, fluffed up his invisible feathers and said “Anyway, changing my corporation to that degree is always such a faff.”
Faff or not, it was clear that they were going to have to make some adjustments to the angel’s disguse, because this was going to cause chaos. The Dowling household was already a hotbed of illicit banging, and the last thing it needed was a busty gardener jiggling over the rose beds. Aziraphale wouldn’t last five minutes if Ambassador Dowling kept on looking at her like that: Mrs Dowling simply wouldn’t stand for it. She was in the habit of throwing things when they displeased her, and you couldn’t very well fling an angel against the wall in the manner of a breast pump or a disembodied latex vagina.
The gardener’s cottage was a tiny mock Tudor building that lay in a hollow just below the main house. From there, separated by a row of spreading lindens and sweet chestnuts, the green lawn stretched upwards to the mansion. Through the winter denuded trees one could just make out the end gable where Crowley slept, or more accurately lay awake most nights, listening to the Velvet Underground with one ear, and with the other attuned to the midnight gurglings of the tiny antichrist in the next room.
The cottage door opened directly on a kitchen, the sink right next to the door. In the middle of the kitchen was a large, old wooden table, and beyond that an archway that led into a cosy, book-lined living area that made Aziraphale gasp with delight when she saw it. “Oh, how lovely,” she said, almost skipping to the nearest bookshelf. Already Crowley could see how the angel would enfold herself in this new living space, how her presence would fill the place with the accompanying Aziraphale-clutter – silver snuffboxes, expensive fountain pens and crackly old forty-fives of Maria Callas singing Tosca.
“Look at all those books about plants,” said Crowley, slinking up behind her. “You can read those, you know. Instead of sitting around eating chocolates and mooning over Baudelaire, or whatever it was you were up to in London. You know – when you weren’t learning what a gardenia looks like.”
“Shopping,” said Aziraphale. “I was mostly shopping. You can’t expect me to get up to speed on gardening and ladies’ fashion, you know. The underwear alone is remarkably complicated.” She turned and performed some distractingly bouncy adjustments to the frontage. “I’m still not completely sure I’ve got the brassiere right. Is there any tea, do you think?”
“No idea.”
Aziraphale headed back to the kitchen and started throwing open various cupboards. She tutted when she saw that the teapot was on the highest shelf, and was just about to levitate the thing when Crowley stopped her. “Uh uh. No miracles.”
“Levitation is not a miracle.”
“It is,” said Crowley. “Unless the laws of physics have suddenly changed enough to allow teapots to float down from shelves.”
Aziraphale pouted. “You’re a fine one to talk about bending the laws of physics. You and that car.”
Crowley winced. The Bentley was still a sore point. “I mean it,” she said. “We’re supposed to be deep undercover here. You said it yourself – this is an ambitious and dangerous project. This is The Arrangement on steroids. We are essentially attempting to thwart Armageddon, and I don’t know about your lot, but my lot have been itching for a punch up ever since the day Satan took a nose dive off a cloud. They are liable to be homicidally disappointed if said punch up doesn’t happen, and I would prefer that they never, ever find out that I was the one responsible for their disappointment, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good. So you agree? No miracles.”
“No,” said Aziraphale, still looking pouty, not to mention annoyingly pretty.
“No more turning supermarket wine to a Premier Cru, no tapdancing across the trout pond, and definitely no raising the dead.”
“All right. If you’re quite finished nagging…” Aziraphale pulled up a chair. “Hold this steady for me.”
Crowley held the chair as Aziraphale climbed up to retrieve the teapot. She realised too late that she was about to get an eyeful. The tweed skirt went up like a theatre curtain, revealing creamy lace stocking tops and a rounded pink bum barely covered by a wisp of shockingly sexy underwear. Crowley hadn’t been sure what she’d expecting, but she hadn’t been expecting that. Clearly Aziraphale had learned bugger all about horticulture over the last few months, but she’d learned plenty about women’s undergarments. Aziraphale was wearing French knickers – beige satin, trimmed with frothy white lace. “I don’t know what they were thinking,” she was saying. “Putting the teapot all the way up here…”
But Crowley wasn’t listening. As Aziraphale climbed down from the chair, Crowley was reeling from the revelation that there was something that was going to drive her even more insane than her nightmare scenario of Aziraphale playing the gardener as a comedy country bumpkin. This. This was much, much worse. She was no stranger to yearning when it came to Aziraphale, but this was going to be tough. It had been several centuries since the last time Crowley had been a practising lesbian, but apparently all it took was one flash of celestial French knicker and she was already wondering what an angel’s pussy tasted like.
“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t show up at all,” said Crowley, retreating to a safe distance across the kitchen. “You remember the plan?”
“Of course I remember the plan,” said Aziraphale, putting away the chair and smoothing her skirt down over her hips.
“I influence him toward the darkness, you influence him toward the light—”
“—and we cancel one another out. Same as always. I know, Crowley.”
“Don’t call me Crowley,” said Crowley. “My name is Nanny Ashtoreth.”
Aziraphale raised an arched eyebrow. “Ashtoreth? Subtle. Why don’t you throw in an Asmodeus for good measure?”
“Laugh it up, Fanny Fell. I’m not the one who sounds like a pelvic floor malfunction. Anyway, you were supposed to be here four months ago. I’ve been doing my bit, but you haven’t been doing yours. He’s going to be four months more evil than he’s supposed be, and that might not seem like a lot to you, but it might be the difference between Armageddon and not-Armageddon.”
“So I’ll put in some overtime,” said Aziraphale. “Besides, how much influence is the child absorbing anyway? He’s a baby. He’s probably not much more sensible to anything beyond the basic sensations of hunger, tiredness and needing a nappy change. I very much doubt he’s in a position to grasp the finer points of theology as laid down by Saint Thomas Aquinas, is he?”
“Not yet,” said Crowley. “But steer clear of Aquinas when he is, yeah? I don’t think the whole Just War is a concept we want to introduce to a kid who was essentially born to kick off the final battle between Heaven and Hell.”
Aziraphale nodded. “Perhaps you’re right.” She eyed Crowley suspiciously. “What have you been reading to him?”
“I have been reading him The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” said Crowley.
“Not sure I’m familiar with that one.”
“I suppose you could call it a ringing endorsement of the merits of Gluttony,” said Crowley. “But mostly it’s about a caterpillar who eats things and eventually turns into a butterfly. Oh, and there are holes to wiggle your fingers through. He likes the holes. Can’t get enough of the wiggly finger holes.”
“Aw.”
“Yeah. It’s quite sweet, actually. And don’t worry too much about that four month head start. I wasn’t wiling very hard anyway, although I will be wiling harder from now on. Now that you’re here.”
“Wile away,” said Aziraphale. “I’m ready for you. You wile, I thwart.”
“Right then.”
“Right.”
Crowley looked Aziraphale up and down, and felt as though she should say something. “You look…nice, by the way. Buxom. Winsome, even. I hope you’ve got some more practical clothes for gardening, though.”
“Oh, absolutely. I’ve got all kinds of gardening gear in the trunk. This is just a travelling ensemble.”
Travelling ensemble? God, she probably had a walking dress and a fucking riding habit in that trunk. The nineteenth century had done a real number on Aziraphale’s fashion sense. “Well, it’s lovely,” said Crowley.
“Oh. Thank you.” Aziraphale blushed prettily. “You look lovely, too.”
“Shut up.”
“No, you do. I could never pull off a pencil skirt like that.” Aziraphale sighed. “Just don’t have the hips for it, I’m afraid.”
For the first few months Crowley and Aziraphale existed in the kind of stalemate they’d worked so hard to perfect over the previous six millenia. They kept largely out of one another’s way and met beside duck ponds. Perched like bookends on a park bench, they would sit and pretend that their conversation wasn’t one of grave importance, while Aziraphale tossed bread to the ducks and Crowley gently rocked the baby back and forth in his pushchair.
This didn’t last long, because Warlock outgrew the pushchair with startling speed. He took his first steps at the advanced age of eight months, or so his parents claimed. What actually happened was that at eight months he was just about stable enough for someone to hold him up by the armpits while he made walking movements. Dowling pronounced his son and heir a prodigy and immediately went out and bought him a set of junior golf clubs in anticipation of the happy day when he would one day join his father on the greens. Harriet Dowling gave him the sideeye for a week.
Thankfully Crowley’s anxieties about the ambassador and the angel came to nothing, because Dowling was currently absorbed in his son. He hadn’t found the child especially interesting for the first few months, when Warlock did little but cry, sleep, eat and shit, but the baby had reached that beguiling age where he was starting to look around, gurgle and coo. Every day brought new noises and new capabilities. He held his head up for longer. His wavering dark blue gaze fixed more clearly on the faces that smiled down at him. Even a lump like his father found him charming, and the Dowlings got over their post-natal teething troubles and formed a mutual admiration society for their adorable new son.
Crowley – already accustomed to the shifting sands of the Dowlings’ marriage – suspected that this bliss wouldn’t last forever, but in the meantime she wasn’t knocking it. She had her hands full not only with the baby but with Aziraphale, who was a terrible gardener.
This wasn’t the handicap it might have been, since Aziraphale’s picture of what a gardener actually did had little to do with the reality of running an estate, and everything to do with sickly nineteenth century children’s books, where the gardener was a source of rustic, working class wisdom for posh kid protagonists who had been alienated by their rich and indifferent parents. In reality, Aziraphale found herself in the more administrative role of an estate manager, doing the books and payroll for a team of gardeners who were a lot better with plants than she was. Whenever she was called upon to do any actual gardening, Crowley followed her around and – behind her back – gave the plants a stern talking to.
“Look,” she’d say, glowering at a hopelessly overwatered geranium or petunia. “I know she’s bloody awful at this, but I’m not, so get over it. Or you’ll have me to deal with.”
If it knew what was good for it, the plant would then shiver and release the excess water from the bottom of the pot. On the offchance that it didn’t wet itself when Crowley glared, Crowley would pay a return visit and do the old empty pot trick that had always worked so well on her own houseplants.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Aziraphale said. “You seem to have a magic touch with them.” She gave Crowley a needling look. “It’s not magic, is it? Because you know what we said…”
“No, it’s not magic,” said Crowley. “It’s science, I think. I talk to them, that’s all.”
“What about music?” said Aziraphale. “Do you play them music? I’m sure I read somewhere that they enjoy music.”
“Yeah, sometimes.” Crowley’s plants didn’t enjoy music as such, but they had been subjected to it on occasion, like the time when a greenfly outbreak had caused Crowley to get really theatrical and crank out the relevant parts of Carmina Burana as a backdrop to her own infernal screaming. Two hours later every greenfly lay belly up on the windowsills, having been evicted by their terrified hosts.
Aziraphale’s taste in music was a lot less satanic. She was currently somewhere in the rose garden, her presence announced by the snatches of opera she was humming to the plants. Like most angels, Aziraphale sang, but in true Aziraphale fashion she didn’t quite get it right. In her regular corporation she was a powerful light baritone. Too powerful, in fact, and she’d been shunted discreetly out of the Heavenly Choir for sounding a bit too Gilbert and Sullivan. Obviously those hadn’t been the exact words used, because this was several thousand years before Gilbert and Sullivan existed, but as soon as they had existed Crowley would have put money on someone up in Heaven seeing the premiere of HMS Pinafore or whatever and being all, “Oh, that’s how Aziraphale sings.”
In her new corporation, Aziraphale was an alto, and apparently enjoying it. Fragments of Voi Che Sapete floated out from the rose garden. Crowley, in a black one piece bathing suit and a big black straw hat, basked by the pool. The Dowlings had flown to Martha’s Vineyard to spend Warlock’s first birthday with his grandparents, and Crowley had two weeks off. The gardens were in the full bloom of June and Crowley soaked up the sun like a happy reptile.
One of the young gardeners was working on the opposite side of the pool, weeding one of the tiered rockeries that led down to the Jacobean garden. Crowley could make out his shoulders – bare, broad and tan – and the top of his head. She had caught him looking a couple of times, but didn’t respond. She lay inscrutable behind her sunglasses, ankles crossed and her heels still on. The shoes were new, a pair of snakeskin sandals whose many straps were elaborate enough to detract attention from her scaly toes. The secret service detail had gone to America with the family, so there was a lot less banging going on behind closed doors. All the same, an inevitable hot-weather antsiness had settled over the skeleton staff of the household. It was summer, after all. Bare limbs, naked nights and brief bikinis. Crowley glimpsed the gardener looking her way again, and uncrossed her legs. She drew her feet further up the sun lounger and affected a yawn as her long legs parted. Oh yes. He was looking now, his eyes drawn like magnets to the pale insides of her thighs, and the tight, skimpy wisp of black lycra that hugged the space between them. Maybe, just maybe, when there was no one around, she’d indulge his curiosity. And maybe – although this was a long shot, she knew – getting roundly fucked by a sexy young gardener might distract her from lying awake on hot summer nights, wondering what that frilly-knickered angel wore in bed, if anything.
“…but I knew love before I left my nurser-eee…”
Aziraphale had exhausted her repertoire of Mozart and changed her tune. Crowley stirred.
“…left alone with big fat Fanny, she was such a naughty nanny…”
“Seriously?” Crowley murmured. The last thing Nanny needed right now was a reminder of just how much she wanted to be naughty, especially where fat bottomed girls were concerned. Aziraphale wandered into view, a basket on her arm and her bobbed blonde curls covered with a straw hat sporting a pale blue ribbon. She wore a well-filled peasant blouse and from the waist up looked like she was about to sit for a painting for Mme. Vigée Le Brun, notwithstanding the fact that she was currently singing a song about large female arses. From the waist down the look was more contemporary, with high waisted khaki shorts that should have been absurdly old fashioned, but – probably more by accident than design – were being touted as the must-have look for this summer.
“…oh, won’t you take me home tonight, oh, down beside your red firelight…”
An angel. In Birkenstocks. Singing Fat Bottomed Girls. How was it possible for one being to be this many kinds of ridiculous all at once? And when – seriously, when? – was Crowley ever going to stop being into it?
Crowley peered over her glasses. Aziraphale was pruning roses. Or trying to. Feeling sorry for the roses, Crowley gathered up her black sarong and headed over to the rose garden. “What the hell are you doing?” she said.
Aziraphale peeked up from under the brim of her hat. Her face was slightly sunburned and starting to freckle, like the skin of a ripe pear. “My job,” she said. “What does it look like? We can’t all have two weeks off, you know.”
“That’s not what I meant at all,” said Crowley, reaching for the secateurs. They were as blunt as butter knives, and where Aziraphale had tried to cut with them the rose stems looked as though they’d been gnawed. “Your pruning shears need to be sharp, angel. And you don’t cut that far up. You need to be nearer the knuckle.”
“Near the knuckle? I would have thought that was more like your kind of thing.”
“It is. How are you still so rubbish with plants?”
“Well, I’ve finished, anyway,” said Aziraphale, snatching back the shears. “And I have to take these roses back to the cottage. Are you going back to the pool, or would you care to join me for a spot of inappropriate drinking?”
“How is that even a question? Have you even met me?”
They made their way back through the rose garden, Crowley’s high heels sinking into the grass, and Aziraphale too indifferent to her role to point out that Crowley’s sandals were wrecking the lawn. She padded along in her Birkenstocks, the new angle of her hips lending a bouncy sway to her usual abstracted gait. She didn’t know the first damn thing about gardening, and she’d probably never learn, but she’d look lovely while doing so.
It was cool in the cottage. Aziraphale dumped the roses stem down into the washing up bowl and plucked at the waistband of her shorts. “These things are so tight,” she said. “Would you mind squeezing a couple of lemons while I slip into something more comfortable?”
There were lemons in a bowl on the table. They had come from the long, lean-to greenhouse that a Victorian owner of the house had built against the outer wall of the Jacobean knot garden. Crowley liked to slip in there every now again, sometimes to chat to Aziraphale, other times just to breathe in the smell of hot foliage and ripening fruit that reminded her of Eden. Figs grew there, along with kumquats and the sweet yellow cherry tomatoes now piled up beside the sink. A bunch of carrots lay on the draining board, their feathery green tops streaming down like hair. Aziraphale may not have been much of a gardener, but Crowley had to give her credit for – occasionally – looking like she knew what the hell she was doing.
“Oh, that’s better,” said Aziraphale, emerging from the other room. She had swapped the shorts for a long, filmy peasant skirt in shades of pale blue and beige. Her feet were bare, and the skirt clung to her legs as she walked, waking Crowley’s thirst for more than just booze. What was under there? More fancy lace underwear? Or perhaps nothing at all.
“What are we doing with these lemons?” said Crowley.
“Tom Collins?”
“Lovely.”
Crowley squeezed the lemons while Aziraphale – with surprising ferocity – smashed up ice with the back of a meat hammer. Crowley couldn’t remember if a sugar frosted glass was standard for a Tom Collins, but she was happy enough to indulge the angel’s sweet tooth. The first shakerful slipped down way too easily, and they took their refills out onto the tiny patio where the geraniums bloomed in spite of Aziraphale’s persistent attempts to kill them with kindness. Aziraphale sprawled out in a deckchair with her feet resting on an upturned trough planter, so that the slight summer breeze caught the edge of her gauzy skirt and made it flutter, fine threads of gold embroidery catching in the linden-dappled sunlight. She lay back, gin-flushed and tousled, her eyes closed and her tip-tilted profile raised to receive the sun’s light like a blessing. Crowley watched and wondered – as she had a thousand or more times before – what would happen if she reached out, took hold of Aziraphale’s hand and told her that she loved her, that she’d always loved her, and that she found her almost unspeakably beautiful and marvellous.
Everything, probably. Everything and nothing. That’s what would happen. And it would hurt.
“I have to say,” said Aziraphale, without opening her eyes. “This is my kind of undercover mission.”
“I know. It’s very nice,” said Crowley, which was something of an understatement, because it was bloody gorgeous. This was why they were doing this in the first place – the wind in the treetops, the June sunlight hot on her skin. The drops of condensation on the copper skin of the cocktail shaker, the taste of lemon and juniper in her mouth, and the company of an old, dear friend. This was a world worth saving, and oh dear…gin always made her sentimental. “It won’t always be like this, you know,” she said.
“I know.”
One day soon they would be back on opposite sides. There would be no more of this. Just them. Working together. “They’ll come back from holiday,” said Crowley. “And the boy will keep on growing. Can’t be drinking gin before six o’clock when I’m charge of a toddler. And he’s very nearly a toddler.”
“They grow fast.”
“So fast.”
“Soon he’ll be old enough to absorb impressions. Influences.”
“Yep.” Crowley kicked off her heels and propped her feet alongside Aziraphale’s perfect pink angel feet. They looked very demonic by comparison. “‘Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.’ Wasn’t that your man Aquinas?”
Aziraphale shook her head. “No. Loyola, I think.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Crowley moved her foot closer and their toes touched. She pushed and Aziraphale pushed back, and Aziraphale was drunk enough to giggle, pillowy bosom trembling under her muslin blouse. “You’re drunk,” she said.
“I’ve got two weeks off. What’s your excuse?”
“Latent alcoholism?”
“Did you say latent or blatant, because I can tell you right now which one is more accurate.”
But it was too late. The brief, sacred moment of silliness had passed, and Aziraphale didn’t laugh. “We haven’t got much time, Crowley,” she said. “They grow up so fast, and if this doesn’t work…”
“…but it will. Because we can do this.”
Aziraphale sighed and squinted up at the sunlight and the leaves. “Perhaps,” she said. “I don’t really want to save the world, you know. I mean, I’ll do it if I absolutely have to, but I’m sure the world would be better off being saved by someone who was a lot more competent than me. Someone less prone to getting pissed in the afternoons.”
“Well, don’t look at me,” said Crowley. “I’m just as pissed as you are.”
This time Aziraphale managed a weak laugh. The breeze caught her hem again and the wind must have strengthened since they sat down, because this time her skirt billowed up like a sail over her lap, baring her oval pink knees and broad thighs. “Oopsy,” she said, and pushed it back down, tucking the fabric between her thighs to hold it down. She was delectable and she had no idea, and it was making Crowley nervous.
“Listen,” said Crowley. “I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“Be careful, okay?”
Aziraphale frowned. “Careful? Of what? What on earth are you talking about?”
There was no easy way to say this, so Crowley decided to come straight out with it. “You’re very attractive, Aziraphale,” she said, and the angel immediately blushed. “You’ve got…that nose. And the cupid’s bow mouth. Perfect teeth…”
“…oh, really…”
“…no, I’m not trying to blow smoke up your arse. I’m just saying. Even as a man you’re quite…pretty, but as a woman you’re even prettier. And you’re nice. You’re not the type to punch a man in the throat if he tries to stick his hand up your skirt. All I’m saying is…be careful.”
“Crowley, I can handle myself,” said Aziraphale. “You don’t need to worry. I admit I don’t have as much experience navigating the hazards of a female corporation as you do, but I’m not some fluffy little duckling that you need to protect.”
“I know,” said Crowley. “I do. It’s just…” She sighed. “Look, all I’m saying is you haven’t seen the worst of it yet. Dowling’s preoccupied for now, because the baby’s gone past the boring puking potato stage and is now in the interesting, cute gurgly stage. But you weren’t here when the kid was less interesting. He was bored. And horny. One time he tried to stick his hand up my skirt.”
Aziraphale’s blue eyes went wide. “Oh, my dear. I hope you punched him in the throat?”
Crowley shook her head. “Nah. I just gave him The Look.” She lowered her glasses and demonstrated. The Look was very yellow, and didn’t have much in the way of pupil, other than a thin black slit like an exclamation point, which was – coincidentally – the exact verbal response it triggered in the brains of anyone who saw it.
Except for Aziraphale, of course. She was used to it by now.
“My point, angel,” said Crowley. “Is that you don’t have that particular defence mechanism at your disposal.”
Aziraphale pursed her lips. “I am perfectly capable of punching someone in the throat, thank you.”
“Yeah, okay. I’m just saying. Keep an eye on Dowling. The only reason that man isn’t working his way through the housekeeping staff is because the housemaids are way ahead of him and already treating his secret service detail like an all you can eat sexual buffet.”
Aziraphale sputter-laughed through a mouthful of gin and soda. “Crowley!”
“What? It’s true. All those buff young men in sharp suits and sunglasses? Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
“I have not,” said Aziraphale, turning pious and fluffy. “Nor will I ever.”
“Oh, you will. You’ll have to think about it, sooner or later. You’ll stumble across it at some point, because I did.”
“Stumble across it? What do you mean?”
“The usual,” said Crowley. “Giggling, squeaking bed springs, slamming doors. Knickers left on the stairs one time.”
“Knickers?”
“Knickers and condom wrappers. Trust me, this place is a hotbed of illicit hook-ups.”
“I suppose that’s your influence?” said Aziraphale, trying to look censorious, no easy feat when you were that deep in a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.
“Me? No. I didn’t do a damn thing.”
“Really? When you’re strutting around the place looking like a dominatrix?”
“Excuse me?” said Crowley. “When did you ever see a dominatrix in a kitten heel?” She sighed. “God, I miss my Jimmy Choos.”
“Then why aren’t you wearing them?”
“Because they’re four inch fuck-me heels and I really would look like a dominatrix,” she said. “And the last thing I want to do is get Father Dowling’s blood pumping again. It’s going to piss on our plan if one of us gets fired because Harriet thinks we’re a threat to her marriage.”
“If you get fired then I go, too,” said Aziraphale. “Equal and opposite and all that. We do this together or not at all.”
“Agreed,” said Crowley, more pleased by this than she wanted to let on. “But let’s try to avoid that scenario altogether, shall we? We can’t leave the boy alone to be influenced by just anybody. He might turn out to be really monstrous.”
“He’s the Antichrist, Crowley. Monstrous is a given.”
“He’s not monstrous at all. He’s…he’s a baby.” Aziraphale looked sceptical, and Crowley was drunk enough to keep going. “I’ve bathed him. I’ve seen every little inch of him. He’s a perfectly normal baby. No weird birthmarks, no horns. Ten fingers, ten tiny toes. Itty bitty fingernails. Fat little knees.”
Aziraphale raised an eyebrow. “You sound as though you like him.”
“He’s a baby. He’s cute. I can’t help it if I do. Babies make you like them. That’s how they survive. They’d never make it in the wild if they weren’t so bloody adorable. It’s just…science. Or something.”
“Fine. Just don’t get too attached, Crowley.”
“I’m not,” said Crowley, wondering if Warlock had talked yet. When the Dowlings had left he had still been at the burbling stage, but more and more of his burbles had been starting to sound word-like. She caught herself hoping that she hadn’t missed the baby’s first words, and resolved to cut back on the gin. It always made her sentimental.
The Dowlings returned on the following Saturday. Harriet Dowling wore a new Lily Pulitzer and a scowl. “A tree surgeon,” she said, by way of explanation, when she and Crowley were alone. “He fucked a tree surgeon. Named Rowan. I’m serious. That was her name. A tree surgeon whose name is a goddamn tree.”
“What a strange coincidence,” said Crowley, in Nanny’s Morningside tones. The baby was heavier on her hip now, and he kept trying to snatch her glasses. “Warlock, dear, don’t do that. Nanny doesn’t care for it.”
“Nana!” said Warlock.
Crowley blinked very rapidly, and took several deep, steadying breaths.
“Oh, he does that, now,” said Harriet, partly charmed out of her rage. “The whole time we were away it was Nana, Nana, Nana. He missed you.”
“Oh, my darling,” Crowley cooed. “Nanny missed you too.”
The Antichrist dimpled sweetly and bared his tiny white baby teeth in a winning smile. It figured. His father had been quite charismatic, back in the day.
Crowley joined Mrs Dowling at the nursery window. The sound of her molars grinding could be heard from the other side of the room, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Thaddeus Dowling was prowling at the top of the lawn. Further down the lawn, Aziraphale – her luscious round arse in the air – was weeding a border.
“Great,” said Harriet. “Another one who puts the whore in horticulture.” And with that she stalked off, leaving Crowley with the baby.
Crowley exhaled, watching the oblivious angel wiggle provocatively above the summer heathers. “Well, bugger,” she said.
“Bu-ga,” echoed Warlock, with apparent relish.
“Shit,” said Crowley. She was going to have to start watching her language. Among other things.